Gladys Aylward: Missionary to China

A small room in London. A parlor maid counting coins on a bedspread. She earns two shillings and ninepence a week. A ticket on the Trans-Siberian Railway costs forty-seven pounds, ten shillings. She begins saving. One coin at a time.

This is not the beginning of a novel. This is the beginning of one of the most remarkable missionary stories in history. Gladys Aylward, a woman with no formal education, no financial backing, no mission board behind her, and no reason to believe she could succeed, traveled alone across two continents to reach the mountain villages of northern China. She would live there for decades. She would become a Chinese citizen. She would adopt orphans, outlaw foot-binding, and lead one hundred children over the mountains to safety during a war. And it all started with a handful of coins on a bed.

If your family is exploring how to teach kids about world missions, Gladys Aylward’s story belongs near the top of your reading list. Not because it is neat or comfortable or easy to explain, but because it shows what happens when God takes hold of a person the world has dismissed and refuses to let go.

The Parlor Maid

Gladys Aylward was born on February 24, 1902, in Edmonton, a working-class neighborhood in north London. Her father worked in the post office. The family was not poor, exactly, but they were not comfortable either. Money was counted carefully. Luxuries were rare. The house smelled like tea and boiled potatoes and the damp that crept into every London home that could not afford enough coal.

Gladys left school as a young teenager. She had not distinguished herself academically. She was short, barely five feet tall, with dark hair and a face that was plain and earnest and easy to overlook. She went into domestic service, the path that most girls of her class and education followed, and became a parlor maid. A parlor maid cleaned the parlor, answered the door, served tea, polished silver, and was expected to be invisible. Gladys was very good at all of it except the invisible part. She had opinions. She had energy. She had, beneath the starched white apron and the quiet “yes, ma’am,” a restlessness that would not sit still.

She went to church. She listened. And somewhere in the back of a London chapel, the God of the universe spoke to a parlor maid and told her to go to China.

She did not hear an audible voice. She did not see a vision. She simply became convinced, in the deep and stubborn way that some people become convinced of things, that God wanted her in China. She could not explain it to anyone’s satisfaction, including her own. But the conviction would not leave. It sat in her chest like a coal that would not go out.

Rejected

Gladys applied to the China Inland Mission, the great mission agency founded by Hudson Taylor decades earlier. She attended their training center and began her studies. It did not go well. The coursework was difficult. Languages were particularly hard for her. The mission board assessed her progress and concluded that she was unlikely to learn Chinese. They rejected her application.

Think about what that means. The one organization most dedicated to reaching inland China, the very agency built on the principle that God uses ordinary people, looked at Gladys Aylward and said: not you.

She was devastated. But she was not finished.

The Bible is full of people God chose whom other people rejected. David was the youngest son, overlooked by his own father when the prophet came to anoint a king. Moses stammered. Gideon was hiding in a winepress. The apostles were fishermen and tax collectors. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth:

“For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” (1 Corinthians 1:26-27, ESV)

Gladys Aylward was not wise by human standards. She was not influential. She was not of noble birth. She was a parlor maid who could not pass her exams. And God chose her. The mission board’s rejection was not the end of the story. It was the first page.

If you want to understand what a missionary is and what qualifies a person for the work, Gladys Aylward’s story is a corrective. The qualification is not intelligence or education or social standing. The qualification is obedience. God does not call the equipped. He equips the called. And sometimes the equipping looks nothing like what the training centers expect.

The Trans-Siberian Railway

If the China Inland Mission would not send her, Gladys decided, she would send herself.

She went back to work as a parlor maid and began saving every penny she could spare. Two shillings and ninepence a week. She put the coins on her bed at night and counted them. She kept a running total. The cheapest route to China was overland, by train, on the Trans-Siberian Railway from London to The Hague, then to Moscow, across Siberia to Vladivostok, and from there by ship to Japan and then to Tianjin, China. The ticket cost forty-seven pounds, ten shillings.

At two shillings and ninepence a week, it would take years.

She saved anyway. She bought the ticket in installments, paying a little at a time, and on October 15, 1932, she boarded a train at Liverpool Street Station with her passport, her Bible, a small suitcase, and two pounds, nine shillings in cash. She was thirty years old. She was alone. She had never left England.

The journey was not the romantic adventure it might sound like. Through Europe it was merely uncomfortable, rattling through Holland and Germany and into the Soviet Union on hard wooden benches in third-class carriages that smelled like tobacco and wet wool and unwashed bodies. But when the train crossed into Siberia, things turned dangerous. A conflict between China and the Soviet Union had disrupted rail service, and the train stopped at a remote station in the middle of the Siberian wilderness. Soldiers were everywhere. The temperature was brutal. Gladys was told the train would go no further.

She was stranded in Siberia. In winter. With almost no money.

Most people would have turned back. Gladys did not turn back. She retraced her route to a station where she could catch a different train, eventually made her way to Vladivostok, and from there crossed to Japan by ship. In Japan, the British consul helped her find passage to Tianjin. From Tianjin she traveled inland, by train, by bus, by mule, through landscapes that looked nothing like Edmonton, past terraced hillsides and river gorges and villages where the rooftops curved like the spines of sleeping animals.

She arrived in Yangcheng, a walled city in the mountains of Shanxi province, in late 1932. She had been traveling for weeks. She was exhausted, hungry, and completely without a plan except one: she was where God had told her to be.

Shanxi province sits in the northern interior of China, part of the vast region that falls within the 10/40 Window, the band of the globe between ten and forty degrees north latitude where most of the world’s unreached people groups live. In the 1930s, these mountain villages were as remote as any place on earth. No electricity, no running water, no paved roads. Mule drivers carried goods over narrow mountain paths. Women cooked over open fires in courtyards surrounded by walls of packed earth. The language was not the Mandarin of Beijing but a thick Shanxi dialect that even other Chinese people found difficult to understand.

This was where Gladys Aylward, the parlor maid from Edmonton who could not pass her language exams, would spend the next two decades of her life. And she would learn the language. She would learn it so well that the local people would forget she had ever been foreign.

The Inn of the Eighth Happiness

In Yangcheng, Gladys joined an elderly Scottish missionary named Jeannie Lawson, who had been working in the region for years and desperately needed help. Jeannie had a plan: she wanted to open an inn. Not a church, not a school, not a clinic. An inn.

The logic was simple and brilliant. Yangcheng was on a mule route. Every night, mule drivers came through the town looking for a place to sleep, feed their animals, and eat a hot meal. If Jeannie and Gladys opened an inn, the drivers would come to them. And while the mules ate and the drivers rested, the two women could tell stories. Bible stories. The drivers would carry those stories with them to the next town and the next, spreading the gospel along the trade routes like seeds scattered by wind.

They called it the Inn of the Eighth Happiness. (The name came from the Beatitudes, the eight blessings Jesus pronounced in the Sermon on the Mount.) They rented a run-down building, cleaned it, repaired it, stocked it with food for mules and men, and opened for business. At first, no one came. The mule drivers were suspicious of the foreign women. Gladys solved this problem with characteristic directness: she stood in the road, grabbed the lead mule of a passing caravan by the bridle, and physically led it through the gate into the courtyard. Once one group of drivers came, word spread. The inn was cheap, clean, and the food was good. And the stories, the strange stories the small foreign woman told in increasingly fluent Shanxi dialect, were interesting.

Jeannie Lawson died not long after the inn opened, leaving Gladys alone. She was now the sole missionary in a remote mountain town, running an inn by herself, telling Bible stories to mule drivers in a language she had supposedly been unable to learn.

She kept going. She always kept going.

The Foot Inspector

Then came the appointment that changed everything.

The Chinese government had officially banned the practice of foot-binding, the centuries-old custom of tightly wrapping young girls’ feet to prevent growth, a practice that caused lifelong pain and disability. But in the remote mountain villages of Shanxi, the ban was widely ignored. The government needed inspectors to travel from village to village, enter homes, and enforce the law. They needed someone who could speak the local dialect, who was trusted by the village women, and who was small enough and female enough to be welcomed into domestic spaces where a male official would never be allowed.

They appointed Gladys Aylward.

Think about what this means. A foreign woman, a former parlor maid, a rejected mission candidate, was now a government official in rural China, authorized to enter every home in the region. Every door was open to her. Every village expected her. And in every home she entered to inspect the feet of young girls, she also told stories. She told them about a God who loved them. She told them about Jesus. She sat on packed-earth floors with village women, drank tea, unwrapped bandages from small broken feet, and spoke of a kingdom where the broken are made whole.

No mission board designed this strategy. No training center taught it. God simply opened a door that no human being could have predicted, and Gladys walked through it.

She traveled constantly, on foot and by mule, through mountains and valleys and villages so remote that some of them had never seen a foreigner. She became known. She became trusted. She became, in a way that no strategic plan could have engineered, part of the fabric of life in Shanxi province.

She took the Chinese name Ai-weh-deh, which means “the virtuous one.” She became a Chinese citizen. She did not merely live in China; she became Chinese. She ate Chinese food, wore Chinese clothing, spoke the Shanxi dialect as her primary language, and adopted the customs and courtesies of the mountain people she served. Like Amy Carmichael in India, who wore a sari and spoke village Tamil and became “Amma” to hundreds of children, Gladys understood that the gospel arrives best when it arrives in the cultural clothing of the people, not the cultural clothing of the sender.

She also began adopting children. Orphans, abandoned children, children no one else wanted. One of them was a girl she bought at a market for ninepence, the smallest coin in her pocket. She named the girl Ninepence. Ninepence, the name and the child, nine copper coins’ worth of humanity, became one of the great loves of Gladys Aylward’s life. She adopted several more children over the years, building a family out of the ones the world had thrown away, just as God had taken a parlor maid the mission board had thrown away and made her into something no one expected.

War Comes

In 1937, Japan invaded China. The war came to Shanxi province in the form of bombers and soldiers and a violence that the mountain villages had never imagined. Yangcheng was bombed. Buildings collapsed. People Gladys knew and loved were killed. The Japanese army advanced through the region, and the mountain towns that had been so remote and so peaceful became battlefields.

Gladys did not leave. She stayed through the bombing. She helped the wounded. She hid refugees. She continued her work, moving through the villages on foot even as the war raged around her. She was injured in one bombing, sustaining wounds she would carry for the rest of her life. The Japanese put a price on her head. She was known to them as “the small woman,” and they wanted her captured or dead.

Still she stayed. She stayed because the children needed her. As the war dragged on, orphans multiplied. Children whose parents had been killed, whose villages had been destroyed, whose families had scattered or died, were wandering the mountains alone. Gladys gathered them. She took in every child she could find. She fed them, clothed them, told them stories, held them at night when the sound of distant bombing woke them screaming.

By 1940, she had nearly one hundred children in her care. And the Japanese army was closing in on Yangcheng.

One Hundred Children Over the Mountains

In the spring of 1940, Gladys Aylward made a decision that would become the defining act of her life. She could not keep the children in Yangcheng. The Japanese were coming. If they found the children, the children would be killed or worse. She had to get them out. The only safe destination was Sian (now called Xi’an), the capital of Shaanxi province, far to the southwest. Between Yangcheng and Sian lay the mountains of Shanxi, rugged and steep, crossed only by narrow paths that wound through gorges and over passes where the wind cut like a blade.

There was no vehicle. There was no mule train. There was no military escort. There was only Gladys, barely five feet tall, and approximately one hundred children, the youngest barely old enough to walk.

They set out on foot.

The journey took about twelve days. Twelve days of walking through war-torn mountain terrain with one hundred children who were hungry, frightened, and exhausted. They had almost no food. They had no supplies to speak of. They slept in the open, on the ground, huddled together for warmth in the mountain cold. Gladys carried the smallest children. The older children carried the younger ones. They sang hymns as they walked, not because they felt cheerful but because the singing kept the children moving and drowned out the sound of their fear.

They crossed the Yellow River, that great muddy artery of northern China, and Gladys prayed aloud on the bank because there was no boat and no way across, and a Chinese Nationalist officer appeared with a patrol boat and ferried them to the other side. They climbed passes where the path was so narrow that the children had to press against the rock face and shuffle sideways. They walked through villages that had been burned to the ground. They walked past bodies.

Gladys told the children stories the entire way. She told them about Moses leading the Israelites through the wilderness. She told them about the God who parts seas and provides manna and does not abandon his people in the desert. She told them these stories because she believed them, and because the children needed to hear, in the middle of a nightmare, that someone was in control, that someone saw them, that someone had not forgotten them.

They arrived in Sian. All of them. Every single child survived the crossing.

Gladys collapsed upon arrival. The journey had destroyed her body. She was severely ill, suffering from typhus, pneumonia, malnutrition, and injuries sustained during the war. She was delirious for days. Doctors were not sure she would survive. She did survive, but her health was permanently broken. The small woman who had walked one hundred children over the mountains would never be fully well again.

What Kids Can Learn from Gladys Aylward

Gladys Aylward’s story teaches children things that no curriculum can replicate, because her life is proof that God does not share the world’s criteria for usefulness.

God does not need your resume. Gladys had no degree, no money, no connections, no impressive skills. She was a parlor maid. The mission board looked at her and saw a woman who could not pass exams. God looked at her and saw the woman who would rescue one hundred children. The world measures potential by credentials. God measures potential by willingness. If you are willing to go where he sends you, he will equip you for what he asks you to do.

Rejection is not always the final word. The China Inland Mission rejected Gladys, and they were not wrong about her test scores. But they were wrong about what God could do through her. If a door closes, it does not mean God has stopped working. It may mean he has a different door, one you cannot see yet, one that will require you to buy your own ticket and board your own train and walk your own path through Siberia in winter. Rejection hurts. But obedience does not require permission from everyone.

Faithfulness looks like showing up, again and again. Gladys did not arrive in China and immediately do something dramatic. She cleaned an inn. She cooked meals for mule drivers. She inspected feet. She told stories, night after night, to men who smelled like mules and road dust. She adopted one child, then another, then another. The great rescue of the hundred children did not come until she had been faithfully present for nearly a decade. Faithfulness is not one grand gesture. It is a thousand small ones, repeated until they add up to something only God could have planned.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Gladys was afraid. She was afraid on the train through Siberia. She was afraid when the bombs fell on Yangcheng. She was afraid every day of the twelve-day march over the mountains. But she walked anyway. She walked because the children were behind her and there was no one else to lead them. Courage is not feeling brave. Courage is putting one foot in front of the other when everything inside you wants to stop.

Every child matters. Gladys bought a girl at a market for ninepence and gave her a name and a home. She gathered orphans from burned villages and carried them on her back over mountain passes. She did not calculate how many she could reasonably manage. She simply took every child she found. Every one. Because every child is made in the image of God, and every child deserves to be loved, and the God who counts the hairs on your head does not overlook a single one.

The ordinary is the raw material of the extraordinary. Gladys Aylward did not have extraordinary gifts. She had ordinary gifts, stubbornness, compassion, a willingness to work hard, and she placed them in the hands of an extraordinary God. That is the pattern of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation: God takes what is small and makes it sufficient. Five loaves and two fish feed five thousand. A shepherd boy’s sling brings down a giant. A parlor maid’s savings buy a ticket to the other side of the world.

The Coins on the Bed

Gladys Aylward never fully recovered from the mountain crossing. After the war, she eventually left China and later moved to Taiwan, where she continued working with orphans until the end of her life. She died on January 3, 1970, in Taipei, at the age of sixty-seven.

In 1958, Hollywood made a movie about her called The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman. Gladys was unhappy with the film. It changed too many details, romanticized things that did not need romanticizing, and got the name of the inn wrong. She did not need Hollywood to make her story dramatic. Her story was already more dramatic than anything a screenwriter could invent. The truth was enough.

And the truth keeps circling back to those coins.

A small room in London. A bedspread covered in copper and silver. Two shillings and ninepence a week, counted carefully, stacked deliberately, each coin a tiny act of defiance against everything the world had told her she could not do. She could not pass the exams. She could not learn Chinese. She could not be a missionary. She put another coin on the bed.

Every coin she saved was an act of faith. Not faith in herself, because she knew perfectly well what she was: a short woman with no education and no prospects and no reason to think she would succeed. Faith in the God who had spoken to her in a London chapel and would not stop speaking. Faith that the God who calls you to do something will give you everything you need to do it, even if “everything you need” arrives one coin at a time, one mule driver at a time, one child at a time, one mountain pass at a time.

Every step across the mountains was an act of faith. Every night sleeping on cold ground with one hundred children pressed against her was an act of faith. Every hymn she taught them to sing, every story she told, every time she picked up a child too small to walk and carried them on a back already broken by war and illness and years of hard living in the Chinese mountains, that was faith. Not the dramatic, photogenic faith of the movies. The grinding, daily, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other faith that God seems to prefer above all other kinds.

The whole story is one long act of faith disguised as stubbornness.

And perhaps that is the deepest lesson Gladys Aylward has to teach our children. That faith and stubbornness are sometimes the same thing. That the person who refuses to accept the world’s verdict, who keeps saving coins when the math says it is hopeless, who keeps walking when the mountains say stop, who keeps carrying children when her body says no more, that person is not foolish. That person has simply learned to listen to a different voice. A voice that says: I chose the foolish things. I chose the weak things. I chose you.

The coins are still on the bed. They were always enough.